Kaitlin Bevis's Blog

Today is the last day of the Creative Writing Camp program. Students opened the day with their choice of creative writing games. Then we had a mini lesson on revision and editing, and students spent the rest of the day finishing their writing piece for the creative writing camp anthology. We closed the day with a student author signing and publishing Q&A. Click through the slide show to follow along!

Today, in Advanced Topics in Creative Writing, we started class by taking a look at how word choice, on a microlevel conveys mood. The students had to rewrite a description from a horror novel to a description with a romantic lens.

Afterwards, we looked at the scene/sequel format and had a talk about pacing. The rest of the day, students worked on revising their pieces for the camp anthology. Click through the slide show to follow along and try the exercises out for yourself.

Today, in Creative Writing Camp, we focused on writing vivid descriptions, blocking, and internal reactions. Then we combined them all into different writing exercises and scenes. The big idea here is every word should do multiple jobs. If you describe something, there should be a reason it’s described and that description should tell you more about the character, their state of mind, the world they live in, and the emotional tone you’re trying to hit all at the same time. We use the pyramid of abstraction as our foundation for this exercise.

After lunch, the students did some people watching and wrote descriptions from the perspectives of different characters before breaking up into their workshop groups. Click on the slideshow to follow along!

Today, in Advanced Topics in Creative Writing Camp, campers learned to weigh every single word by taking part in a writing challenge where they tried to cut a piece of flash fiction into exactly half the words without sacrificing clarity. This is a great exercise for really evaluating the words on the page on a microlevel. I encourage everyone to try it on a regular basis to continue honing their skills.

After the writing challenge, we took a break and then came back to a lesson on writing and formatting dialogue. Check out the slideshow to follow along!

It’s a new week of camp, and this week we’re learning about advanced topics in creative writing. This camp used to be called Economy of Language because at its core, this week’s lessons focus on getting the most out of every word in your book, story, or poem. There’s a finite number of words in every piece of writing, so each word needs to do multiple jobs.

After some initial getting to know you icebreakers, we spent most of the day practicing grounding readers in a scene by shuffling the who, what, and where of random three sentence story starters. Campers had to guess the who/what/and where of each groups scene based on the descriptions used (no words from the prompts were allowed in the actual submissions).

Then we went over some basics of flash fiction and workshopping in a writing group. Click through the slides to follow along!

Today was the last day of Creative Writing: World Building Camp. We spent the morning learning about constructed languages. In the afternoon, the students were cautioned about world builders disease, and then put the finishing touches on their maps. Then we did a solar system walk, where the kids got to present the worlds they created. Click around the slideshow to follow along, and be sure to tune in next week for advanced topics in creative writing.

Today, in World Building Camp, students spent the morning adding fine details to their world maps. After lunch, we added people by learning about different rules of thumb for history, culture, and society. Click around the slideshow to follow along!

Today, in Creative Writing: Worldbuilding, we learned all about how to populate a world with flora and fauna. Then we went on a walking field trip to the trial gardens to see some interesting plant hybrids and get inspired.

We combined that with what we learned yesterday about geographic features, and went over some techniques for map making. The students spent the rest of the time with leaves, macaroni, and dice to create their world maps.

Most of these resources were borrowed from a now defunct world building challenge webpage. Click around the slideshow to follow along!

Today in world building camp, we opened with the hard science of building a world from the ground up using actual science and probability. This activity comes from a series of unit plans on roleplaying science lessons I did with my daughter during covid homeschool. This particular activity, called roll up a planet 1-3, is free. I simplified it a bit for camp purposes (mostly by creating a periodic table chart that only includes the listed elements and has them in order of density with the colors) because I’m not actually teaching the period table, and if you’d like access to that, email me your download receipt (personal info redacted) from Hellmund Science, and I’ll happily share.

Now in the original version, the point of this is to show how rare a planet like Earth is. For creative writing camp, it’s a brainstorming game. Okay, your planet formed without water. Let’s imagine some alternate life or technology to settle there!

After lunch, we learned about Sanderson’s 4 laws of building magic systems. Click through the slideshow for more information.